McAdams On: BBC, Digital Disaster and Eisenhower

MULTIPLE DIMENSIONS — Three disparate
news items recently
struck me as congruent.
One described the
flame-out of the BBC’s
Digital Media Initiative. The second—a D-Day
story, and the third, a Slashdot item about IT
mismanagement.

The $150 million BBC fail is shaking more
trees than a derecho. IEEE Spectrum’s Robert
N. Charette reports that British lawmakers
want a word with former BBC chief, now head
of The New York Times, Mark Thompson,
who appears to have omitted significant
chunks of reality in his 2011 testimony for a
Parliamentary audit:

“Thompson was quoted as saying that
he gave his testimony ‘honestly and in good
faith,’ and said, as he vigorously tossed
everyone below him at the time under the
bus, ‘I did so on the basis of information
provided to me at the time by the BBC
executives responsible for delivering the
project.’”

Self-preservation, if not entirely palatable,
is both instinctual and today’s beau ideal
of business ethics, as opposed to the
handwritten note Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower
carried in his pocket June 5, 1944, as he
prepared to dispatch 160,000 youngsters into
one of the deadliest battles of World War II, as retold by Scott Simon of NPR.
It was his speech, had the Allies lost: “If any
blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is
mine alone.”

We would be dumbfounded by those
words today and likely would deride their
author as a blunderer. This could be why
we’re invested in CYA such that folks will
put a light bulb in a chassis and call it a
“breakthrough,” with all the conjured veracity of a card sharp.

Which brings us to the Slashdot piece
and others like it that describe how IT hiring
is hit-and-miss because non-IT people have
no metric by which to gauge competency.
The digital media world is still a frontier in
this regard, as demonstrated disastrously
at the BBC. The post mortem should not be
about blame, but about each step where egos
trumped rigorous planning and analysis.